Research How to Cite: Westwell, G. 2019. Peace Cinema: Religious Pacifism and Anti-War Sensibility in Friendly Persuasion (1956). Open Screens, 2(1): 1, pp. 1–32. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/os.11 Published: 23 May 2019 Peer Review: This article has been peer reviewed through the double-blind process of Open Screens, which is a journal published by the Open Library of Humanities. Copyright: © 2019 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Open Access: Open Screens is a peer-reviewed open access journal. Digital Preservation: The Open Library of Humanities and all its journals are digitally preserved in the CLOCKSS scholarly archive service. Westwell, G. 2019. Peace Cinema: Religious Pacifism and Anti-War Sensibility in Friendly Persuasion (1956). Open Screens, 2(1): 1, pp. 1–32. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/os.11 RESEARCH Peace Cinema: Religious Pacifism and Anti-War Sensibility in Friendly Persuasion (1956) Guy Westwell Film Studies, Queen Mary University of London, UK
[email protected] Through close examination of William Wyler’s 1956 filmFriendly Persuasion, this article describes the complex ways in which this western melodrama seeks to foster an anti-war sensibility via engagement with the experience and commitments of religious pacifism. The example ofFriendly Persuasion is used to illustrate how US society acknowledges religious pacifist beliefs and argues that the Quaker (Society of Friends) ‘peace testimony’ is shown in the film in an intelligent and respectful way and as a proxy for a broader democratic anti-war perspective.